I'm a techie & attorney.
Been on the net a long time.
I have a Norbert Wiener Award for Social and Professional Responsibility, and I've been a Fellow of Law and Technology at CalTech & Loyola/Marymount Law.
And yes, I am that person who was elected to the ICANN Board of Directors and who ended up suing them to see the financials (I won, hands down.)
Everything there is to know about me is on my personal and company websites:
https://cavebear.com/
https://iwl.com/
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I consider these kinds of events to be nearly useless symbolism, preaching to the choir.
I do accept that these events are useful as means to meet others, but one should not expect these events to have even the slightest impact on the maga/white-nationalist/musk-ites... Nor do I think they have much impact on those who are in "the middle" and do not particularly engage in politics.
"Nearly 1,000 gather at Main Beach to create ‘Resist!’ human banner protesting Trump administration "
@ikuo1000 We have so many deer - and gophers and foxes and turkeys and mountain lions, banana slugs ... that almost nothing evades becoming food for some kind of critter. We have to put up deer fencing and plant things in gopher baskets. That can get expensive when our garden may eventually grow to around ten acres (right now it's only about a half an acre.)
@CNN @us-news-CNN These so-called "agents" neither display nor present identity or proof that they actually are "Federal agents" (and not "actors").
CNN and other media should not accept without question or proof that these goons are actually "Federal agents" and should described them as anonymous armed, masked people who are trying to break into a Congressman's office and kidnap one of his staff.
@ikuo1000 I've started a project to build a 50 to 75 foot long rhododendron and azalea lined path (with sitting areas). I have a suspicion that I will be feeding a lot of deer.
@sb @neil POSIX of the 1980's was supposed to a "write once, run everywhere", but that flopped. Now we have Java claiming "write once, run everywhere" and then Docker, virtual machines, flatpack, etc to solve the fact that the truth is that we have not achieved a write-once-run-everywhere world.
And now Google and others are doing the old Microsoft trick of private APIs that everybody uses, thus leaving some browsers, like Firefox, and their users hanging.
who called it crispr and not gene hackman
@jalefkowit Don't forget his shortest, but greatest performance...
The hermit in Young Frankenstein:
@neil On my Macs I am increasingly finding that websites fail under Firefox but work fine with Safari.
@igd_news These "officers" and "agents" hide their identities and show no proof of their authority.
They are, indeed, a Secret Police.
And these are secret police who, through many indicators, appear to be tied to right wing white nationalist, neo terrorist groups. These people are not new-hires into government - they were already there when FFOTUS came in - but the restraints on on their actions have been released (probably directly or implicitly via Stephen Miller and Noem.)
Thinking of police - these "agents" are not, in my way of thinking, entitled to call themselves "police". That word comes from the Constitutional concept of "police powers", which is generally a State level of power, not a Federal one. So that patch that says "POLICE FEDERAL AGENT" is, in my eyes, both incorrect and intentionally deceptive.
Our secret police culture perhaps began with TSA which, nearly from the outset, had agents who had name tags that displayed only a number.
@GreenFire I do not know who Taylor Lorenz is, but what she says does have a degree of merit.
We do need to remember that the US has a big, heavy, often clumsy hand that we have wielded over the years in some rather ill ways ranging from the overthrow of Mosaddegh in Iran, VietNam, Bhopal, etc. That has left a lot of people around the world understandably very angry with us.
The US has also done a lot of really great things for people around the world. But those good things tend to be obscured by our militaristic posturing, not to mention that in the eyes of much of the world, our national wealth is obscene. (For some reason the anger is aimed more at highly wealthy countries rather than hyper-wealthy individuals or corporations.)
We did not deserve 9/11. Nor did the British deserve the King David hotel bombing. But the anger that drives people to terrorism is something we should try to comprehend.
@jalefkowit When I was working on the DARPA Robotics Challenge the purpose was nominally to build robots that could rescue people from burning buildings or go into places like Fukishima and turn control valves and such.
But in the back of our minds we all knew that these machines could easily be used as robotic soldiers.
(My role in the challenge was to control the badness of the network communications - with the purpose of deterring remote-control driving and encouraging local, autonomous, on-board-the-robot decision making.)
Sunday Friends: @judithbolyard.bsky.social @northjules.bsky.social @andreadevon.bsky.social @sentenne.bsky.social @spincreep.bsky.social @tashaheadricknyc.bsky.social @ferst60.bsky.social @pete-1972.bsky.social @claynobles.bsky.social @dcombes.bsky.social @maplemama20.bsky.social
@chris I would definitely be in favor of a path for former felons to become firefighters.
Being locked up changes people and having a productive future can tip the balance whether that change is for good or ill.
We ought to make sure that we pay them well - it is a tough, hard, miserable, dangerous job. The need to be paid enough so that they can go to a home they own, prop their feet up, and de-compress.
Which leads me to the point that here in the US we have come to over-value brain work and under-value the skills of those who use their hands.
@TheConversationUS I tried, and failed, and failed, and failed...
Some years back I had access to a full-fledged 747 simulator at a NASA facility and I tried to land at SFO - many attempts, many splashes into the bay or gouges on the ground. I seriously bent that virtual aircraft.
@lauren That decision makes sense and is consistent with the decisions of the copyright office that AI generated works are not protectable under US copyright law.
@karlauerbach absolutely. I wish people would yell out "HELP! KIDNAPPING!" and call 911 to report it whenever they see anonymous armed gangs kidnapping people.
@jamesmarshall Indeed, calling out "kidnapping" or the like is somewhat accurate (more accurate than yelling "rape".)
I've heard similar advice such as if one is assaulted on the street that it is useful to start breaking windows (especially store front windows) and yelling "fire".
@JamesWNeal Gestapo.
OK, so here is purportedly ICE doing a raid ... and the news media quietly accepts, from "agents" who displayed no proof that they were actually Federal agents, much less their identity.
How can we know that these masked men (most of 'em are men) are actually who they claim to be?
